Nine Seasons in, Bob's Burgers Remains as Well Done as Ever

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Nine Seasons in, Bob's Burgers Remains as Well Done as Ever

Fox

If your preferred metric for animated TV is "absurd but endearing," last night's ninth-season premiere of Bob’s Burgers may have broken your dial. After Tina Belcher’s family accuses her of being preoccupied with boys—“I’m not boy crazy, I’m boy-focused,” she tells them—she decides to dress up as a boy to follow another boy into a boy-band audition. (Hang on, we're only about halfway through the "boy"s.) The rest of the episode involves Tina meeting and fantasizing about other would-be boybanders, leading to a variety of musical sequences in which she portrays a) an astronaut caught in a outer-space love triangle with two boys who compete for her love, b) a high-powered executive on a work trip with an colleague boy in an opposites-attract rom-com, and c) an ’80s aerobics student who catches the eye of the boy leading the class. It's all exactly as ridiculous as you might imagine. And exactly as enjoyable.

Since South Park emerged 21 years ago, the vast majority of adult-geared animated TV has followed its irreverent example, skewing either toward dorm-room surrealism (various Adult Swim series) or off-color edge-pushing (various Seth McFarlane series). But in recent years, the kind of animated content being produced for adult audiences has begun to shift and grow—and Bob’s Burgers, which manages to capture that boundless delight and joy like few others, has been instrumental in that change.

Fox

A quick primer for those who have never seen the FOX series: Bob’s Burgers centers on the Belchers, a working-class family that owns a burger restaurant in a small beach town. You've got Linda (John Roberts) and Bob Belcher (H. Jon Benjamin, who you may know as Archer's Archer or Wet Hot American Summer's can of vegetables); you've also got their kids, bunny-ear-wearing evil genius Louise (Kristen Schaal); schlubby, fart-music-obsessed Gene (Eugene Mirman); and the aforementioned storm of hormonal awkwardness, Tina (Dan Mintz).

Like most post-’60s primetime animated television, Bob’s Burgers owes its satire and self-awareness to The Simpsons. But from its very inception, Loren Bouchard's series approached comedy with less irreverence and more heart than many of its peers: The pilot's plot centered on a health inspector temporarily shutting down the family’s restaurant after Louise started a rumor at school that the burgers were made with human remains. As time went on, the family dynamics and not-exactly-attractive animation style built from that initial premise something not only cohesive, but consistently enjoyable. By now, Bob’s Burgers has been nominated for the Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program seven years in a row; it might be weird, but it’s working.

Beyond the voice acting, which ranges from teen-weirdo affectlessness (Dan Mintz as Tina) to fine-tuned mania (basically everyone else), Bob’s Burgers evolved into one of television's great musicals. The first season peppered in incidental ditties like the aptly named, 27-second “Butts Butts Butts",” but slowly those single-gag compositions turned into full-fledged songs, and by now it’s not uncommon for a musical number to become central to the episode’s plot. (To wit: “The Bleakening," an hour-long musical episode in season eight which culminated in the whole family ending up at a Christmas rave at a makeshift gay nightclub.) In 2017, in fact, Sub Pop released a compendium of all the show's songs—all as authentic, unassuming, and weird as the show itself.

Meanwhile, much of the rest of primetime animation has made its home not in primetime, but in the eternal twilight of streaming platforms. But whether you prefer the wrenchingly existential show-business satire Bojack Horseman or the gleefully puerile puberty chronicle Big Mouth, neither would be possible without Bob’s Burgers. Yes, both diverge from it in tone, animation style, and comedic approach, but that’s the whole point: animated programming has successfully outgrown the novelty of dysfunction for dysfunction's sake—an energy that so many shows tapped The Simpsons for, but never thought to reach beyond. Bob’s Burgers reminded audiences what they were first taught by The Simpsons, and then by King of the Hill—that adult animated shows can have range.

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